About the Washington Post’s union, Dan writes:
While I’m generally pretty skeptical about private-sector unions (let alone public-sector ones), I get why people in some industries join them, and why they once played an important role for workers. My grandfather, who started as a coal miner and ended up as a longshoreman, was a big union man, and I can’t very well blame anybody in those lines of work for thinking they want the protection of a collective. But try as they might, writers can’t turn a news room into a coal mine or a dock.
But they do try. And their trying is absolutely hilarious. That’s the only just word for it: hilarious. Outside of the narrow context that Dan provides, unions are so out of place in the modern world as to be intrinsically funny. They’re like flamingos in the Somme, or a bagpiper on a Ferris Wheel, or a newborn baby at the controls of a passenger jet. Whenever one laughs at journalists forming unions, one gets a lecture about the value of collective action per se. But we’re not talking about collective action per se; we’re talking about its misapplication by some of the silliest people in the country. There are lots of things that are defensible in and of themselves, but that, when applied incorrectly, become jarringly incongruous. Bomb-disposal suits are useful, but if I started pulling things out of the oven in one, I’d deserve to be ridiculed. Diplomatic immunity is useful. I don’t need it at Applebee’s. As a smart man one said, the key is location, location, location. The Washington Post ain’t it.
As with the similarly amusing move toward the unionization of graduate students, the habit that some of the Post’s writers are indulging is ultimately completely backwards. They haven’t considered their problems and concluded that a union walkout might be the best solution; they’ve decided that they want a union walkout, and then projected their problems onto its absence. Why? A love of drama, mostly. Usually, the drive to unionize cushy jobs is driven by a combination of a preference for radical chic and a broad-based resentment at having been born too late to have been a part of the moments in history that the organizers most admire. And so it is here. For people who don’t need them, unions provide a thin bat’s squeak of rebellion. They facilitate cosplay for the laptop class — providing a facsimile of danger, and offering up a hollow connection to a people with whom they have nothing in common. And, if the architects of the drive get really lucky, the existence of the union ends up making their job security demonstrably worse, which, via the magic of ideological zealotry, then serves to illustrate how important it was that they demanded one in the first place.
Strictly in the interest of mirth, I hope that the Washington Post’s union survives for another hundred years. I want to see more days like today, which has already brought some classic sentences such as this one, from The Wrap:
Washington Post games reporter Gene Park posted on X that he would participate in the walkout instead of covering “The Game Awards,” live on Thursday as originally planned, “In solidarity with my union family.”
I honestly can’t improve on that. I doubt anyone can. It’s got everything: The job that doesn’t matter — “games reporter” — the irrelevant event — “The Game Awards” — the disconsonant use of old-timey language — “in solidarity with my union family.” There cannot be anyone, anywhere in America, who is sitting devastated at home right now because the Washington Post’s games reporter will not be writing up The Game Awards. When the electricity shuts off, or the planes don’t fly, or the ports are closed to commerce, people notice. Gene Park’s silence, by contrast, represents one of the most spectacular non-events of the twenty-first century. Union or no union, you can’t fix that with indignation. Nobody can — whether their fist is raised or not. Onward!
Journalist Unions Are Hilarious
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07.12.2023
About the Washington Post’s union, Dan writes:
While I’m generally pretty skeptical about private-sector unions (let alone public-sector ones), I get why people in some industries join them, and why they once played an important role for workers. My grandfather, who started as a coal miner and ended up as a longshoreman, was a big union man, and I can’t very well blame anybody in those lines of work for thinking they want the protection of a collective. But try as they might, writers can’t turn a news room into a coal mine or a dock.
But they do try. And their trying is absolutely hilarious. That’s the only just word for it: hilarious. Outside of the narrow context that Dan provides, unions are so out of place in the modern world as to be intrinsically funny. They’re like flamingos in the Somme, or a bagpiper on a Ferris Wheel, or a newborn baby at the controls of a passenger jet. Whenever one laughs at journalists forming unions, one gets a lecture about the........
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